Alice Fordham

Kainaz Amaria
/ NPR

Alice Fordham is an NPR International Correspondent based in Beirut, Lebanon.

In this role, she reports on Lebanon, Syria and many of the countries throughout the Middle East.

Before joining NPR in 2014, Fordham covered the Middle East for five years, reporting for The Washington Post, the Economist, The Times and other publications. She has worked in wars and political turmoil but also amid beauty, resilience and fun.

In 2011, Fordham was a Stern Fellow at the Washington Post. That same year she won the Next Century Foundation's Breakaway award, in part for an investigation into Iraqi prisons.

Fordham graduated from Cambridge University with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics.

In central Damascus, it's perfectly clear that President Bashar Assad is firmly in control. In the souks of the Old City, his face looks out of almost every shop window, pinned up next to gold jewelry or intricate rugs. No one has a bad word to say about him, at least not to a Western journalist. In rebel enclaves nearby, forces loyal to Assad are creeping back into control. After years of siege tactics, opposition forces in the suburbs of Damascus are increasingly making deals that see their...

The Hassan Sham camp, a sprawling refuge for displaced people east of Mosul, is growing by the day as people flee fighting in the city, which Iraqi forces are trying to wrest from ISIS control. Among the tents, toilets and food distribution centers, aid workers have set up classrooms in tents. There's a play space where little girls are jumping rope in the chilly sunshine, while hundreds more children sit in class. They're learning English, Arabic, arithmetic — most for the first time in...

When archaeologist Layla Salih was a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Mosul, Iraq, she visited the ancient site of Nimrud for the first time on a field trip, led by a guide past the remnants of temples and roads to the ancient palace of Ashurnasirpal II. The king of the Assyrian empire, he built his palace at Nimrud almost three millennia ago. Enough of the cuneiform inscriptions, carved stone friezes and sculptures were left that it had been reconstructed throughout the 20th century by Iraqi and...

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: For a month, Iraqi forces have been pressing an offensive against ISIS in the city of Mosul. As NPR's Alice Fordham reports, one elite group is bearing much of that burden. ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: As an array of Iraqi security forces converge on Mosul, some are moving faster than others. Meet the Iraqi Special Operations Forces. (SOUNDBITE OF TRUCK ENGINES) FORDHAM: At one of their bases, three black Humvees full...

The Iraqi soldiers posing for photos next to a pile of captured ISIS weaponry — mortar shells, tanks, even a tunnel-boring machine — are battle-hardened. They have been fighting ISIS all over the country since 2014, when about a third of Iraq fell to the extremists. Speaking at a little base in northern Iraq, they say the fight for ISIS' largest stronghold, Mosul, is different. "In Anbar, there was just us and them," said Cpl. Qusay al-Jubouri, referring to the province west of Baghdad where...

The Karamlesh village meeting begins the traditional way, with Christian prayers led by a priest, murmured and sung, lingering in the evening air. But the meeting's not in the actual village of Karamlesh. It's 40 miles away in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, on red plastic chairs under a dust-yellow sky, next to the corrugated trailers some of these people have been living in since 2014 when the Islamic State took their village. Karamlesh is one of a cluster of Christian villages nestled in...

Hassan Shami camp, about 15 miles east of Mosul, is pristine, the gravel spotless, the rows of tents still white and mostly empty. There aren't yet the crowds of children, piles of garish mattresses, makeshift bathtubs, half-eaten bowls of rice and beans that have become familiar sights at Iraq's many camps for about 2 million people now displaced by the fight against the Islamic State. That is likely to change, and soon. Elite counter-terror forces are now nudging into the ISIS-held city of...

The Iraqi military and its allies have been pushing for a week toward the city of Mosul, held by the Islamic State. For people fleeing the fighting, a few thousand so far, it's been an unbelievably frightening seven days. In the Debaga camp for displaced people, about 50 miles southeast of Mosul, which is becoming more crowded, I sit with a family who tell me about leaving the village where they lived under ISIS more than two years. "We left at sunrise, around 4 a.m., and there...

In the sunlit courtyard of a mosque, overlooked by jagged mountains, dozens of men arrive to offer condolences to the family of Brigadier Hamid Birmous. The commander with the Iraqi Kurdish forces known as peshmerga was killed in action by an ISIS bomb during the operation to retake the city of Mosul, which began this week . Iraqi security forces continue to fight their way through villages and countryside outside the city. In the mainly ethnic Kurdish city of Dohuk, most of the men wear...